6 Disturbing Trends That Might Ruin the Internet Forever

There was a time when no one took the Internet seriously. Gangs of anonymous hooligans could crash websites and swarm online games to their hearts' content. The FBI barely had a website, let alone the ability to arrest 4channers. Cracked was still a print magazine, and America's insatiable desire for dick jokes was met by a vast array of crude Angelfire websites dense with hit counters and various browser-sodomizing embedded GIFs.

The Internet is taking its first baby steps toward respectability, it's true, but it still has a lot of growing up to do before it graduates from "insufferable little shit" to "joyless productive adult."

(When the Internet dies, you'll need published evidence of the truths your teachers failed to mention. Get The De-Textbook and laugh your way through a post-online world.)

Cases in point:

#6. Companies Will Soon Show Bandwidth Favoritism

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Have you ever stopped to think about how weird it is that a single click can deliver you to Facebook or Jim-Bob's Erotic Taxidermy Homepage with equal ease? Facebook spends millions of dollars a year to keep their servers up, while Jim-Bob pays his host about $20 a month. Despite a vast disparity in the bribe budgets of these two media titans, Verizon is forced to treat them like equals. This is what people are talking about when they mention "Net neutrality."

The end of Net neutrality is the tech industry's equivalent of erectile dysfunction. It's going to happen one day, and all the Viagra Google can buy won't stop the inevitable. There's money to be made in treating the Internet the way we treat physical property. Why shouldn't Walmart or Amazon.com be able to pay for better "real estate"? It isn't right that rich people have to browse in the same filthy tubes as gutter punks with cracked iPhones. The moneyed among us should be able to pay (and charge) for a better Internet experience.

That's the basic argument House Republicans made when they added an end to Net neutrality as part of their list of crazy demands for raising the debt ceiling. They lost this year, and perhaps Verizon will as well. But neither group will ever stop fighting this battle. And Comcast, lead wallet in the money-fight against Net neutrality, now spends more money bribing Democrats than Republicans.

Even Google, patron saint of Net neutrality, recently told the FCC that they should have the right to limit how subscribers use their bandwidth. So enjoy your digital palace of socialism while it lasts, comrade, the walls are coming down.

#5. Searches Will Turn into Conversations

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The iPad is proof positive of one incredibly important technology trend: If you give people something they saw in Star Trek, they will buy the fuck out of it. We saw Jean-Luc Picard balding about with this fancy number ...

... and the first company to actually offer a tablet computer that tiny and convenient wound up making approximately every dollar in the country. This goes back further than The Next Generation; Star Trek has inspired inventions ranging from the mobile phone to NASA's new ion propulsion system. Much of this has to do with the series' long-running trend of seeing technology as a good thing, rather than the inevitable precursor to Skynet. Normal sci-fi looks at the concept of a humanoid robot and gives us the T-1000 arm-knifing people. Star Trek takes that same concept and responds with Brent Spiner.

He barely impales anyone.

Outside of the whole "zipping around the galaxy in giant space ships" thing, there's only one major Star Trek innovation without a real-world counterpart: the ship's computer. Captain Picard doesn't hop onto Google when he has a question. He just says, "Computer, what kind of alien venereal disease is Riker covering up with that beard?"

Siri made a valiant effort at this, but she's less a robot you "converse" with than a robot you shout sexual propositions/movie lines at just to see what she'll say. Google's "conversational search," released earlier this year, allows you to search like a Starfleet officer. Finally, you can pace around your living room demanding answers from a robot who sounds a little like Majel Roddenberry. I had some research to do for an abduction article I planned to commit write, so I decided to give this bold new innovation a try.

#4. Anonymity Is No Longer the Norm

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The reason for all this brouhaha over the NSA and the FBI's break into Tor is that a majority of Internet users still remember a time when anonymity was a given. But that era has ended. There will always be more Silk Roads and Tors out there, but nothing you put online is safe. The old days of buying a nudie mag from that dude at the newsstand and trying desperately not to make eye contact are back. Only Google and Facebook play the role of that old man's silent judgmental stare.

While most users still think people SHOULD be able to browse anonymously, a nearly equal majority recognize that this is fucking impossible. Even Hushmail, the go-to messaging service for journalists, child pornographers, and people buying drugs online, is more than happy to decrypt your messages for the feds.

Hushmail"When we said 'private,' we didn't mean 'from the government.'"

As of November, Google started dismantling anonymity in the festering cesspool that is YouTube's comment section. This leaves 4chan and Reddit standing alone, backs against the wall, united by the justice of their cause and fighting to the end with every DOS attack and upskirt picture of a teenage girl in their arsenal.